“…A greater distance between clusters also results in a broader spectrum of variability in the segregating population used for selection. It was also found that genotypes in the same cluster or those that had low genetic divergence and relatively small statistical distances were a greater probability to yield the desired heterotic effects in the population as due to of crossing if they complement some important weaknesses of each other, as opposed to those including genotypes with wide genetic differences and falling in separate clusters (Dave and Joshi, 1995;Kalagare et al, 2022) The extent of genetic diversity between the genotypes was also determined by the substantial variability in cluster means for various characters. The cluster-specific and overall cluster-specific means for each character are given in Table 3.…”